JHU student wins EIC screenwriting award

Junior Kristopher Jansma, a Writing Seminar major, is the first JHU student to win a PRISM Generation Next screenwriting fellowship from the Entertainment Industries Council (EIC). Jansma applied for the fellowship during Intersession and was notified on Feb. 25 that he won. He will be developing the script through August 2002.

Jansma will receive $1,000 for completing a screenplay depicting drug, alcohol and/or tobacco use and addiction, and will have a chance to win an $8,000 scholarship when his screenplay is judged along with the work of the other PRISM Generation Next fellows. In addition to receiving financial support, Jansma will work with an industry mentor and technical advisor during script development.

A representative from the EIC gave a presentation at JHU during the fall semester, encouraging students to apply for the fellowship. The fellowship allows students who have completed at least two classes in screenwriting to demonstrate their awareness of addiction by developing a movie or television series script that accurately and authentically depicts drug, alcohol and/or tobacco use and addiction. One student is selected each year from participating schools nationwide, but this was the first year that JHU was selected as a participating school, joining prestigious film schools like NYU and UCLA.

Now a PRISM Generation Next fellow, Jansma is also a Woodrow Wilson fellow. He was awarded that fellowship when he was accepted to JHU. Under the conditions of the Woodrow Wilson award, recipients are given $10,000 to do undergraduate research. Although at first Jansma was not sure what he would do with the Woodrow Wilson award, half-way through his freshman year he and his roommate came up with an idea for a short film, which evolved into a stage play and then a screenplay that Jansma recently completed. Jansma's next step is to make it into a feature-length movie filmed on digital video.

Most of Jansma's experience at JHU has been with theater, not film. He's been active in the Barnstormers for two years, has acted in several shows, directed Kurt Vonnegut's Happy Birthday, Wanda June and is currently co-producing A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He's also written one-act plays which have been produced by student theater group Witness Theatre. This year, he wrote Vomit the Hamster: A Tale of February, a comedy that is showing the weekend of March 8 in the Swirnow theater.

Jansma's proposed idea for the PRISM Generation Next fellowship is more serious than the comedies he has written for the stage. Jansma provided the EIC with the following synopsis of the script: "In a New Jersey suburb, a high school senior and outcast decides to end his 10-year dependency on Ritalin because he has fallen in love with his classmate and fellow outcast, until she begins to abuse his medication to stay up working and studying, so she can get into college and escape her abusive father. Meanwhile, somewhere in Northern California, a young artist overdoses on Prozac when her boyfriend leaves her on New Year's Eve. Her story goes backwards through the weeks preceding that fateful night, revealing her ruined dreams and the big secret that made her stop taking her medication in the first place." The two plots run separately ? his moving from beginning to end, hers from end to beginning, and in the end the two meet and fall in love in a hospital.

"I chose these issues to write about because they affected the lives of many people very close to me towards the end of high school," Jansma says. "The script means a lot to me personally, because it closely examines stories of these people who I still care about very much. I hope that because these stories are moving to me, that I can make them moving for others who might read them." Jansma adds, "I've been in love with writing since the fourth grade, and this sort of thing is exactly why I started writing, and I hope it's what keeps me going."

For more information on the Entertainment Industries Council, Inc. or PRISM Generation Next, visit http://www.eiconline.org.